The Priesthood in the Elections, and Elections with the Priesthood

Published:Nevskaya ZvezdaNo. 27, October 5, 1912.

      Published according to the text inNevskaya Zvezda.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Progress Publishers,[1975],

      Moscow,Volume 18,

      pages341-344.Translated:Stepan ApresyanTranscription\Markup:R. CymbalaPublic Domain:Lenin Internet Archive

      (2004).You may freely copy, distribute,
	display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
	commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
	Archive” as your source.•README

Accordingto reports in the press, the congresses of small landowners
and deans of churches in 48 gubernias of European Russia have elected 7,990
delegates, including 8,516 priests. The latter make up 82 per cent.

Thecomplete returns for the fifty gubernias cannot much alter this
result.

Letus, therefore, see what these elections signify.

Thelaw provides that the small landowners and the parishes shall elect
one delegateper electoral categoryestablished for participation
in the landowners’ congress. This means that the number of delegates must
be proportional to the amount of land owned by the electorate.

Statisticsfor 1905 give the following data for the fifty gubernias of
European Russia:

Thesedata probably take account of small holdings to a lesser extent
than of the lands owned by the priesthood, Nevertheless, it follows that
the small private holdingstotal 21,300,000 dessiatines, of which priests own 2,200,000 dessiatines,
ora little overone-tenth. Yet the priesthood has elected upwards
ofeight-tenthsof the total number of delegates!!

Howcould that come about? It was simple enough. The fact is that small
landowners seldom go to elections—they lack the means and take little
interest in the matter; be sides, the police put a thousand obstacles in
the way of free elections. The priests, however, have all been “induced”
to attend.

Thepriests will vote for the candidates who suit the government. This
explains whyeven the landlordsare murmuring, to say nothing of
the bourgeoisie. The Octobrists and the nationalists are murmuring
too. They all accuse the government of “engineering” the
elections. But the landlords and the big bourgeoisiethemselveswould liketo engineer the elections.

Thusthere is a clash between absolutism, on the one hand, and the
landlords and the bourgeois bigwigs, on the other. The government wanted to
secure the backing of the landlords and the top strata of the bourgeoisie;
as is known, this idea underlies the whole law of June 3, 1907.

Asit happens, however, the government cannot get alongevenwith the Octobrists. It hasnot succeededin organisingevena feudal-bourgeois monarchy of a kind “satisfactory” to
these classes.

Unquestionably,this failure has in fact been acknowledged by the
government, which has set about organisingits own officialsin
the shape of the subordinate, dependent priesthood!

Inthe science of history, this device of a government which retains
the essential features of absolutism is called Bonapartism. In this case,
it is not definite classes that serve as a support, or not they alone, and
not chiefly, but hand-picked elements, mostly from among various dependent
sections of the population.

Howis the possibility of this phenomenon to be explained in
“sociological” terms, i.e., from the standpoint of the class struggle?

Itis due to a balance between the forces of the hostile or rival
classes. If, for example, the Purishkeviches arecompeting with the Guchkovs and Ryabushinskys, the government
may—provided there is a certain balance between the forces of these
rivals—gaingreaterindependence (within certain, rather narrow
limits, of course) than when either of these classes has a decisive
superiority. If, on the other hand, this government is historically linked
by continuity and so on with especially “vivid” forms of absolutism, and
if militarist and bureaucratic traditions in the sense of non-electivity of
judges and officials are strong in the country, then the limits of that
independence will be still greater, its manifestations still more open, the
methods used in “picking” voters, and electors voting on orders from
above, still more crude, and tyranny still more tangible.

Itis something like this that contemporary Russia is passing
through. The “step towards transformation into a bourgeois

			      monarchy”[1]is made more difficult by the borrowing of Bonapartist methods. Whereas in
France the bourgeois monarchy and the Bonapartist empire differed clearly
and sharply from each other, in Germany Bismarck gave models of a
“combination” of the two types, with those features which Marx called
“military

despotism”[2]—to say nothing of Bonapartism—obviously
predominating.

Itis said that the carp likes to be fried in sour cream. We don’t know
whether the philistine likes to be “fried” in a bourgeois monarchy, in
old feudal absolutism, in the “latest” type of Bonapartism or in military
despotism, or, lastly, in a certain blend of all these “methods”. But
while the distinction may seem very small from the point of view of the
philistine and so-called “legal order”, i.e., from apurelyjuridical, formally constitutional point of view, it is substantial from
the point of view of the class struggle.

Itwon’t make things easier for the philistine to know that he is being
beaten not only in the old way but in the new as well. But thestabilityof a regime pressing down the philistine, theconditions of developmentand disintegration of this regime, and
its capacity to suffer a rapid fiascoall depend to a large degree on whether we are confronted with more or less
evident, open, solid and direct forms of rule of definite classes, or with
various indirect, unstableformsof their rule.

Therule ofclassesis harder to eliminate than the unstable
forms of the superstructure steeped in the shabby spirit of old times and
supported by a picked “electorate”.

Theexperiment of Sabler and Makarov in “organising” the priesthood
for the Fourth Duma elections should be of considerable interest to
everyone, both “sociologically” and in terms of practical politics.

[1]Seepresent edition, Vol. 15, p. 347.—Ed.

[2]SeeKarl Marx,Critique of the Gotha Programme(Marx and
Engels,Selected Works, Moscow, 1958, Vol. II, p. 33).